EBacc scrapped 2025/26: what it means for your school's curriculum and option blocks

The English Baccalaureate is being scrapped. From the 2025/26 academic year, the EBacc no longer appears in key stage 4 performance measures, and the first tables without it are published in October 2026. For anyone planning a KS4 options cycle (heads, governors, heads of department), that means the questions that used to anchor those meetings have changed. Here is what actually happens, which measures change, and where the curriculum and option blocks fit next.

What the EBacc was, and why it's going

The EBacc is a set of core academic GCSE subjects: English, maths, at least two sciences, a language, and history or geography. It was never a qualification in its own right. It was a performance measure: a way of counting how many pupils entered and achieved that combination, and of reporting it against each school.

The 90% target that never landed

When the EBacc was introduced, ministers set an ambition that 90% of pupils would study the full combination of EBacc subjects by 2025 (DfE consultation response, 2017). Take-up never got close. The proportion of pupils entering all five EBacc components has sat between roughly 38% and 40% since 2013/14. In 2024/25 it reached 40.5%, the highest rate since the measure was introduced but still a long way short of the target (DfE, Key stage 4 performance 2024/25).

The case against: narrowed subject breadth

The argument for scrapping the EBacc is that the measure pushed schools towards a narrow, common set of subjects and squeezed others, particularly the arts and creative subjects. The Curriculum and Assessment Review final report, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, made this explicit, pointing to a decline in take-up of some subjects and arguing the EBacc's design was part of the cause. Sector bodies made the same case from inside the classroom: the National Society for Education in Art and Design has tracked the decline in arts and design entries under the EBacc, and the Incorporated Society of Musicians argued the measure worked against a broad music education. Treat those as advocacy: they are the subjects' own professional bodies, and their point is a value judgement, not a neutral statistic.

What actually changes for 2025/26

The removal is not a consultation proposal any more. It is government policy, accepted as part of the response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review (5 November 2025).

EBacc removed from KS4 performance measures

The DfE's secondary accountability measures guidance states the change in one line: EBacc performance measures are removed with effect from the 2025 to 2026 academic year. That covers both the headline measures (EBacc entry, the percentage of pupils entering the full combination, and the EBacc average point score) and the additional measures, including attainment at grades 5 and 4 and above, entries by subject group, and value added by subject group.

Two things worth underlining for option-block planning. First, the EBacc subjects themselves still count. Sciences, history or geography, and languages continue to count towards Attainment 8 and Progress 8; the DfE has simply replaced the "EBacc" label in those measures with the subject names. No change to how they are treated. Second, the subjects that made up the EBacc are unchanged as qualifications. The measure goes; the qualifications do not.

Timeline: first effect visible autumn 2026

The first performance tables without the EBacc are published in October 2026, covering the 2025/26 academic year (DfE secondary accountability guidance). That October publication is provisional; revised data follows in February 2027. So a school planning its options now is making decisions that will first show up, without an EBacc column, in a little over a year.

What this means for your school

The practical effect differs depending on where you sit in the school.

Heads of department and subject leaders

For arts, creative, and technical subjects, the removal is an opening. The main structural pressure to justify your place against a five-subject academic core is gone from the tables. The case for a subject now rests on its own value, not on where it sits relative to the EBacc. For the EBacc subjects themselves (languages, humanities, sciences), nothing is taken away, but a measure that guaranteed their prominence has gone. Subject leaders in those areas should not assume entries will hold up on their own; the reasons a pupil chooses them now need to be argued on merit rather than on the measure.

Governors and school leaders

The accountability frame has shifted. The EBacc entry and APS columns no longer appear, and the measures that remain (Attainment 8, attainment in English and maths, and pupil destinations) are the ones to watch when you scrutinise data. One caution for governing bodies: for 2024/25 and 2025/26 there is no Progress 8 score at all, because the relevant cohorts had no key stage 2 tests during the pandemic. Attainment-only data is a weaker lens on school performance than value-added, and the DfE says so explicitly in its guidance. Governors should read attainment figures in that light, rather than treating a year without a Progress 8 score as directly comparable with one.

Revisiting your option blocks

This is where the change becomes concrete. If your option blocks were built partly around the EBacc (a compulsory language, a history-or-geography slot, or a fixed three-science expectation), the removal gives you a reason to look again at why each element is there. That is not an instruction to strip the blocks back. It is a prompt to ask whether the structure serves your pupils or a measure that no longer exists. The advantages and disadvantages of the EBacc were always contested: breadth on one side, narrowed choice on the other. With the measure gone, the trade-off is yours to make locally, and it should be made deliberately rather than by default.

Practical next steps

What to review before your next options cycle

Start with the structure of the blocks: which subjects are compulsory, how many option slots pupils get, and whether any of that was there for the EBacc rather than for your curriculum intent. Then look at the numbers. The DfE's published data still lets you see entry patterns by subject, so you can check what your own pupils actually choose and whether removing a constraint would change anything in practice. Talk to your subject leaders before you change anything: the removal shifts incentives for arts and languages in opposite directions, and they will know which way their own numbers are moving.

Questions to ask at your next governing-body meeting

Three questions will get the discussion to the point faster than a slide deck. What do our current option blocks exist to achieve, now that the EBacc is gone? Which of our compulsory elements were there to serve the measure rather than the curriculum? And how will we judge whether a broader options offer is working, given that we will not have a Progress 8 score to lean on for the next two years?

What's next: Progress 8 and accountability

Progress 8 remains the headline measure

Progress 8, the value-added measure that compares each pupil's results with the results of pupils with similar prior attainment, remains the headline accountability measure, and the subjects the EBacc once covered still count within it. For the full history of how school performance measures reached this point, see our guide to school league tables. There are two caveats for the near term. Progress 8 cannot be calculated for 2024/25 or 2025/26, because those cohorts have no KS2 prior attainment; it returns for 2026/27. And the government is consulting on changes to Progress 8 and Attainment 8, with an improved model proposed in the review response, so the headline measure that returns may not be identical to the one that left.

Where option blocks fit going forward

The direction of travel is away from a single mandated combination and towards more local decisions about breadth. The EBacc removal does not tell you what to put in your blocks; it removes one strong reason to make them all look the same. The schools that get the most out of the change will be the ones that treat it as a curriculum decision, made with their own pupils and their own subject data in front of them, rather than a compliance task.

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